Amis turned 60 last summer. So how was it – balloons, bubbly, joyous celebrations? He levels a gaze that is only tepidly amused. “It was … not great.” When he recently became a grandfather – he has two grown sons from a previous marriage and an adult daughter – “it was like a telegram from the mortuary.”

In the same piece, we also learn this: “Unusually, for him, [Amis] has already completed his next novel, a satire about modern England in which a young thug wins £100-million in the lottery.”